Sunday, 11 April

Seventh day of the third lunar month

At noon I went to a countryside market. The Soviets originally didn’t allow private trading but recently due to the wartime needs of society, it gave special permission for this type of small free trade market. In Kuibyshev there were two places like this. Both were outside the city. Travelling by car took around 20 minutes to get there. The so-called market was at an open area in the countryside. It was extremely crowded, and the goods being sold were laid out by poor families. They were mainly daily necessities such as shoes, old clothes and miscellaneous things. The things were so broken that even people from the poorest regions in Europe and the United States would not have taken them. Even those displayed in the second-hand markets in China were much better by a million times. From this one can tell how poor they are. There was an old woman who brought three loaves of bread for sale. Two young men ran out and grabbed one and the old woman chased him and got it back. People just stood by and didn’t interfere and I didn’t blame them either. They also didn’t help the old woman to take the young person to the police. You can tell that selfishness is still very much alive among the lower-class. They can not break free from it. It is also true that they are so poor that they had to rob, so people don’t lay blame. The hardship of the Soviet Union during the War of Resistance is more or less the same as us.